.....

God, dead or otherwise, is not my greatest enemy, APATHY is. I suppose the essential angst/complaint of the twent-first century kid would be boredom, or maybe a surfeit of entertainment.
There's a new begging scam on the streets of delhi: a group of women walk around with one very pregnant woman apparently going into labour. They ask for money so that they can take her to the hospital. I usually, as we have somehow all been trained to do, look through them, or look away. One morning (afternoon?) I was coming back from a friends house in Vasant Kunj after spending the night. We had had a good breakfast followed by a couple of very good hash j's. I was in an auto, stoned out of my mind, and somewhat half-heartedly concentrating on not letting it show. The auto-wallah had some radio-station blaring loud enough to wake god and his neighbour, and for once I was too out of it to tell him to turn it off. So there we were, the auto-man and I, tearing down the streets of delhi in a mobile party for two, turning heads and generally having a good time. (dunno if he was tripping too, tho' most of them usually are). A traffic light - the one at the flyover on Africa Avenue, which is usually a long one. Suddenly I noticed a lot of people turning around to look at something to my immediate left, so out of natural curiosity I turned too. A woman was standing there and saying something to (at) me. By the looks of it, she was in full-flow, and had been for a while. Panicking a little, coz I couldn't make out a single word she was saying, I forced myself to concentrate, looking at her attentively, if a little blankly. Wrong move, of course. I had just managed to catch the words aspataal, paise, bus when she decided verbal communication was a washout, and visual messages might work better. Out of nowhere she produced this woman with a huge stomach protruding right in my face, and continued with her pitch. I was just so relieved at finally being able to make sense of what she said that I asked her which hospital they wanted to go to. Taken aback, she recovered quickly enough to give me the name of one. I turned to the auto guy- who was looking at me in the overhead mirror as if he had just realised I was either crazy or stoned out of my head, and asked him how much of a detour that would be. He shook his head. Undaunted, and sort of caught up in my own momentum, I then scooted to the furthest end of the seat, and gestured for them to get in. I will never forget the look on the woman's face, she looked like she wanted to hit me! She said there's five of us. I said well I can drop two of you, and the rest can follow later. The light was changing, and she had given up on me: she just turned around and walked away... sad, it might have been the most interesting auto-ride I ever took (including the one when there were nine of us in one auto at midnight in Jaipur). Oh, well...

Interesting tho', how the number of people copulating in this country and getting pregnant makes this such a very workable scam, all the year round. These people have ideas. Also sad, no matter how much I try, or think and talk myself out of it, they will somehow always be 'these people'. Tho' they fascinate me and I keep saying how I would love to try this sort of unhinged, marginal, free, life on the street ... its the mental boundary that is always impossible to cross. Damn the righteous, productive, insidiously bourgeois middle-class upbringing. Or do I mean that?

Aha!

And no, I am not becoming self-obsessed. Well, no more than usual.

Being 'Special'

This is a rant I have been trying to NOT write for a while now. Apart from being entirely too mean (ah, who am I kidding, like that would bother me) it is also somewhat politically incorrect, and let's face it, a bit too snooty. But well *insert unrepentant devilish mea culpa and lovin it grin here* ...
So, I'm taking spanish classes, in a class of all of two students, which at the time seemed like such a good idea. Oh, yeah, and to clarify, the second student is me. Hmmm, and why, in a completely uncharacteristic gesture reeking of dramatic-transformations,-makeovers-and-other-sponsor-attracting-tactics, you may ask, have I put myself second? Well, that's because there are a few rare people in life that you come across (if you get to be that lucky) who are so very 'Special' that you cannot help but put them first. If you let them, they have the power to change your life, transform the way you look at yourself and the world, and maybe even shake your belief in Darwin. Along the way they also tend to provide a few laughs to be shared with a circle of close (and equally Mean and Evil) friends.

Papoosha, my previously mentioned dog was one of them. He, too, is special in ways that are impossible to explain. Though god knows I've tried (goto picture for brief but speaking visual clue). Anyways, so, I never thought I'd be the kind of twice-blessed person who gets to meet more than one such mind-boggling spectacle in one lifetime. But there you have it, I've been know to be mistaken before (tho' not about Dick Van Dyke). So, the other student in my spanish class, as I'm sure you've guessed (unless you too are one of these exceptional kinds, in which case let me know, I think I'm starting a collection), is the new special person in my life. Wow, that just comes out so wrong without scare quotes! She's this lump of a girl who I would not have likened to a sofa based merely on her physical appearance (honest, the thought never even crossed my poor little misrepresented mind), but the more I get to know her, the more frequently a piece of furniture replaces her in my head. Tho' not the kind of fun and friendly furnishing found in the marshes of Squornshellous Beta. Well, between a classmate with a piece of driftwood for a brain and a teacher who believes the path to comprehensibility goes uphill all the way on Decibel Mountain, these classes are more fun than I care to admit. No really. What other way to an ideal start for your day than to sit there groggy eyed on an empty stomach watching all the fun and, I must admit, feeling sorely left out of the whole "special" thing. So the retard goes back and makes a mistake in something that was drilled into us about two classes ago, at which point also it resulted in the same ten minute struggle between the two that it quickly develops into again. If they weren't two women, I would take their daily monosyllablic battles as some sort of neanderthal 'guy thing', but as it stands...

Everytime the Retard makes a mistake, it all quickly degenerates into a shouting match between the two, with their faces inching closer to each other with each successive volley - throwing just the one poor mispronounced word at each other till in sheer desperation the poor word rolls over and gives up the holy... well, you get the picture. Which also leads naturally to the question "Which one of the two am I referring to when I say the Retard?". Ten minutes ago I would have said my classmate without thinking about it, but now I'm reconsidering. Maybe its like the travis song with all the pregnant ladies, and I'm the poor fellow in chains at the end.

p.s. Song of the Month: Femme Fatale by The Velvet Underground. apropos of nothing. or maybe Some Kinda Love instead.

My Life is Like a Half-Strung Guitar

"Hip", wrote Norman Mailer, "is the sophistication of the wise primitive in a giant jungle...
If the fate of twentieth century man is to live with death from adolescence to premature senescence, why then the only life-giving answer is to accept the terms of death, to live with death as immediate danger, to divorce oneself from society, to exist without roots, to set out on that uncharted journey into the rebellious imperatives of the self."

So where does that leave me, with my half-strung life that could, given the time and attention it demands, someday produce perfect harmonies and righteously climactic riffs, if only I can manage to stick it out through the stringing and the tuning and all that. Progressively more social with each growing day, I sometimes even find myself smiling at random people and being (heaven forbid!) 'civil' to my flatmates! Oh Mr. Mailer, why do you tease me so... just when I don't need to hear that I had it but I lost it, like a french schoolmarm you rap me sharply across the knuckles for being polite! Oh, woe is me, like it weren't tough enough already to fight against my natural instincts to just stare through people and hope they'd disappear; to break down the walls of the bell jar in which I seem to spend my time, so that people's voices intrude eerily, floating in vaguely from a distance, incomprehensible till I actually register their presence, and lift the glass edge a little to try and understand. O! And yes, darlings, this is perhaps as long as my brief flirtation with 'normal' was meant to last - no more 'happy' or 'optimistic' or 'the sun always shines on tv' for me. No wait, I think I'll take that last one.

Anyways, despair is never too permanent, and there isn't just one authority on anything. Definers and definitions abound (it is what we've now been doing for forty thousand years after all):

" But really, hip is hip, enduring through all permutations. Anyone who leaves the house with bed head has an idea of where its light shines." - John Leland

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, the defence rests.

Beta Late Than Never

Yes, I am also aware of the fact that if I had stopped long enough to think about it, I could probably, just maybe, have come up with a better post title. But since this switch to beta is about the most exciting thing that has happened in my blog life of late (not to mention life in general... though the retard is still spicing things up in my Spanish classes), well, what else is there to talk about, I ask you? No major hairiness issues or race prejudices to air, and what can one say that Russel Peters or Borat have not already said - though I did once promise myself to write a post titled "Beige" (c.f. russel peters on SNL). And I did have some fun encounters of the third kind when I went back to college today to get some reco's - but more on that later. Really need a nap right abou.....dsjfhmzzzzzzzzzzzz